Recently, with the increased scale and complexity of IT systems, specialized knowledge is necessary for operation management of the systems. Operation management is also referred to as “operation process” and is performed for each operation management work type of the system under operation management.
At each operation process, an activity diagram is created expressing the work procedure of the operation process. However, to create an activity diagram for each operation process, from scratch each time consumes time. Further, if the drafter has minimal operation management experience, there is a high possibility that an unsuitable activity diagram will be created.
Consequently, there is a method of providing a work procedure that is performed frequently in an operation process as a template. According to this method, when an activity diagram is newly created, frequently performed work procedures can be used as templates, enabling improved work efficiency in creating the activity diagram and improved quality.
Methods of providing templates are categorized, for example, as types that provide basic activity diagrams that are based on best practice of operation management work such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and, types that compare different activity diagrams and provide the portions that are similar.
With the types that provide the portions that are similar, the more activity diagrams that are compared, the higher the possibility is that a template having high commonality will be extracted. However, to compare different activity diagrams, description methods and terms must be standardized among the activity diagrams.
Conventionally, technology has been proposed whereby, process knowledge becomes exploitable beyond field and region by commonly describing and categorizing various processes that exist in the real world (see, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-273313). Such technology enables description methods for activity diagrams to be integrated among different operation processes.
Nonetheless, with the conventional technology recited in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-273313, no reference is made with respect to attribute information (e.g., element name) of elements constituting the activity diagrams. Consequently, a problem arises in that only relations of element names and processing details in the same operation process are integrated and the extraction of a template from among activity diagrams of different operation processes is difficult.
For example, when a template is extracted, not only is flow configuration (connection of elements) of the activity diagrams judged, but also the processing details of each action are judged. In other words, if the processing details are different, similarity will not be determined even if the flow configuration is identical. Whether processing details among elements are the same is often determined by attribute information such as element name.
Therefore, to extract a template, if the element names between compared activity diagrams do not coincide, determining whether processing details coincide is difficult. As a result, template extraction work becomes difficult and just as before, invites the problem of increased workload and time consumed for activity diagram generation.